It was in vain that Miss Jenny Ann pleaded, argued and commanded the little captain to return with the other women to the Preston farm. She simply would not go. So Phyllis stayed behind with her for company.
Just before daylight one of the farmers who lived near the woods where Eleanor was supposed to have been left took the two girls home with him. Eleanor had not then been found.
CHAPTER XV
THE BLACK HOLE
HOURS and hours had gone by, and Eleanor had lain quite still. Sometimes she was conscious, but oftener she was not. The pain in her shoulder, the exhaustion from the long waiting, had made her delirious. When the rain began it seemed at first to refresh her, she was so hot and feverish. Later rheumatic twinges began to dart through her injured shoulder; her whole body was racked with pain. She seemed to be in some horrible nightmare. She forgot what had happened to her. She no longer realized that she was waiting for her friends to come to her rescue; she only believed that, if she could in some way get back to her own home, "Forest House," the agony and terror would cease.
In her delirium Eleanor managed to get up from the wet ground. She never knew how or when, but she remembered groping her way cautiously through the dark forest. The hundreds of trees seemed like a great army of terrible men and women waving angry arms at the frightened girl. Now and then she would bump into one of the trees. Eleanor would then step back and apologize; she thought that she had collided with a human being.
At times Eleanor was dimly conscious that she could hear the sound of her own voice. She was singing in high, sweet tones a song of her babyhood:
"When the long day's work is over,
When the light begins to fade,
Watching, waiting in the gloaming,
Weary, faint and half afraid,
Then from out the deep'ning twilight,
Clear and sweet a voice shall come,
Softly through the silence falling—
Child, thy Father calls, 'Come home.'"
There was something in the familiar words that comforted Eleanor. She would soon find her mother and father and Madge. But step by step Eleanor went farther away from civilization and deeper into the woods. At last she came out of the woods altogether to a more forbidding part of the country. A group of small hills rose up at the edge of the woodlands. They seemed to poor Eleanor's distorted imagination to be a collection of strange houses.
A yawning hole gaped in the side of one of the hills. Years before a company of promoters had believed that rich coal deposits could be found in these Virginia hills. A coal mine had been dug in the side of this solitary hillock. But the coal yield had not been rich enough. Later on the company had abandoned it and the old coal mine was disused and almost forgotten. A strange freak of destiny led Eleanor to the spot.